scholarly journals “Show the Clichés:” the Appearance of Happiness in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Susan Felleman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Working Class ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
Visual Rhetoric ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Happy People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Industrial Settings ◽  
Dramatic Characters

Abstract Le Bonheur, perhaps Agnès Varda’s most beautiful film, is also her most perplexing. The film’s insistently idyllic surface qualities, overtly beautiful imagery, and psychologically impenetrable, improbably content characters mystify and confuse. Of late, feminist scholars have clarified the situation, noting Varda’s incorporation of advertising and pop cultural visual rhetoric to implicate the social forces framing the picture and those insistently “happy” people: more like advertising ciphers than dramatic characters. Varda herself referenced Impressionist painting as a source of the film’s aesthetics. The purposes of this vivid, chromatic intertextual and intermedial source, in relation to the rhetoric of commercial and popular culture, demand attention. Varda studied art history and connected the milieu of Le Bonheur, the Parisian exurbs, their petit-bourgeois and working-class populace, and bucolic leisure, artisanal and industrial settings, to the modernity of 19th-century Impressionism. Le Bonheur uses an Impressionist picturesque dialectically, in relation to a pop contemporaneity, to observe and critique an ideological genealogy of capitalism and its oppression of women.

Beyond equality of opportunity: from 'common sense' to 'good sense'

Soundings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 79 (79) ◽  
pp. 78-93
Author(s):  
Tony Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Equality Of Opportunity ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Good Sense ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ready Availability ◽  
The Relationship

This article addresses the Labour Party's apparent inability to capitalise on the ready availability of good, progressive ideas. It suggests the key is to be found in the idea that the Labour Party no longer represents working-class people, a disjunction that can be best understood using Gramsci's distinction between 'common sense' and 'good sense'. Good sense is a more coherent development of everyday, commonsense thinking, based on its 'healthy nucleus'. However, it must never lose contact with common sense and become abstract and disconnected from life. Using this distinction, a critique of the common-sense notion of meritocracy follows, since the educational disconnect between Labour politicians and their working-class supporters is one of its malign results. This critique builds from the evidence of working-class rejection of meritocracy - the healthy nucleus that recognises the inadequacy of its justifying principle of equality of opportunity. To this is counterposed a good-sense notion of equality - one that embraces equal access to the means for achieving a flourishing life. This notion of equality is then used to explore a number of currently circulating political ideas concerned with equality, both their relationship to common sense and their potential to meet good sense criteria. These ideas include universal basic income, the Conservatives' proposed 'levelling up' agenda, and the demands of Black Lives Matter for racial justice, including the demand to 'defund the police'. A second thread is focused on the relationship between these discourses of common or good sense and the social forces with which they can be connected.

Trading Work and Pay

1993 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 18-23
Author(s):  
Michael Rustin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Shopping Mall ◽  
Political Strategies ◽  
Market System ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
The Social

Gary Cross's article is a valuable and welcome attempt to extend the scope of labor history. to give attention to issues of popular culture and consumption that have been brought to current prominence especially by work in the field of cultural studies. Clearly this move reflects wider changes in society, in which the hegemony of commodity production appears to be exercised as much through the attractions of advertising and the shopping mall as through the disciplines of the factory and office. But as Cross is able to show, these are not new issues. Working-class movements have long sought to resist the power of capitalism and class domination through the social linkages of alternative class cultures as well as through bargaining and political strategies, though in the consumerist age these forms of cultural resistance are easily forgotten. Cross is right to suggest that these issues and struggles - whatever their outcomes have been – are important to labor history. His central idea of exploring the antinomies of money (conferring power within a market system) and time (allowing partial withdrawal from it) as alternative kinds of class demands, is an interesting and potentially fruitful one.

Falling birth rate in the capitalist countries of Western Europe

1935 ◽  
Vol 31 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 520-523
Author(s):  
F. G. Mukhamedyarov
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Status ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Birth Rate ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Sharp Decline ◽  
The Social ◽  
Maternal Function ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Status Of Women

The beginning of a sharp decline in the birth rate in Europe dates back to the last quarter of the 19th century, the period of the heyday of capitalism, when the exploitation of the working class takes on the most refined forms, the contradiction between the social status of women and her maternal function appears sharper and brighter.

Punishment and the Lessons from History

1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Social Control ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Legal Sanctions

This article examines the range of social forces which constitute the collection of legal sanctions which make up modem punishment systems. While not disputing the importance of the social control capacities which have been influential in the process, it argues that we also have to take into account changing cultural sensitivities and the still prevailing remnants of 19th Century political economy if we are to effectively understand the nature of punishment today. It draws primarily, although not exclusively, on historical research undertaken in New Zealand.

Cultural Studies and Communication

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toby Miller
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The Social

Communication and cultural studies share turbulent and contradictory histories, epistemologies, methods, and geographies, both on their own and as partners and rivals. This is in keeping with their status as interdisciplinary areas that emerged in the early to mid-20th century and crossed the humanities and the social sciences. Communication and cultural studies are linked and distinguished both by the topics they analyze and by their politics, countries, disciplines, theories, languages, and methods. Whereas the dominant forms of communication studies are dedicated to scholarly objectivity and disciplinary coherence, cultural studies is more akin to a tendency connected to concerns and identities on the margins of academia, and committed to methodological diversity. And whereas the critical strand of communication studies, notably political economy, examines such social forces of domination as the state and capital, cultural studies investigates the struggles undertaken by ordinary people to interpret dominant cultural forms in terms of their conditions of existence. The supposedly pessimistic orientation of political economy is frequently eschewed in favor of a faith in the resistive qualities of the oppressed and silenced. A similar perspective characterizes cultural studies’ rejection of effects studies for neglecting the politicized way that active audiences interpret media texts. In place of such concerns, the dominant strands of cultural studies tend to favor aesthetic and anthropological ways of analyzing societies to examine subjectivity and power and work with the understanding that popular culture represents and creates rituals and vice versa, through institutions and discourses that construct identities, which in turn form them.

Mapping Paris: Social and Artistic Networks, 1855–1889

Leonardo ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 446-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire L. Kovacs
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Methodological Tool ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

Mapping Paris: Social and Artistic Networks, 1855–1889 charts and analyzes 19th-century social networks in order to map the artistic collaborations taking place in Paris between the Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1889. In doing so, it allows scholars to view the data in novel ways and to foster considerations of aesthetic dialogue through crossed paths, acquaintances, friendships, conversations and collaborations in the social condenser of Paris. This article focuses on situating the project on its theoretical foundations, considers some of the research questions that can be investigated through such a methodological tool and contemplates the implications on the discipline of art history.

scholarly journals Constructing drug effects: A history of set and setting

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 205032451668332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ido Hartogsohn
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Drug Policy ◽  
Drug Research ◽  
Drug Effects ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Psychedelic Drugs ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Psychedelic Research

Set and setting is a term which refers to the psychological, social, and cultural parameters which shape the response to psychedelic drugs. The concept is considered fundamental to psychedelic research and has also been used to describe nonpharmacological factors which shape the effects of other agents such as alcohol, heroin, amphetamines, or cocaine. This paper reviews the history and evolution of the concept of set and setting from the 19th-century Parisian Club des Hashischins, through to 1950s psychotomimetic research on nondrug determinants of psychopharmacology, the use of extra-drug techniques by psychedelic therapists of the 1950s, and the invention of the concept of set and setting by Leary. Later developments and expansions on the concept of set and setting are discussed, and the term of collective set and setting is suggested as a theoretical tool to describe the social forces which shape individual set and setting situations. The concept of set and setting, it is argued, is crucial not only for psychedelic research but also for advancing drug research and developing more effective drug policy.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary-Ann Constantine ◽  
Éva Guillorel
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
The Social

The Introduction offers a comprehensive account of the Breton gwerz or narrative song tradition. It situates the discovery of the tradition in the context of a broader European Romantic revival of interest in popular culture, and introduces readers to the major collectors and collections of gwerziou from the early 19th century to the present day. It discusses the strengths and limitations of the corpus as it has come down us—what types of song may or may not have survived. It also examines the main generic characteristics of the Breton ballad form, comparing them briefly with narrative songs from France and the other Celtic-speaking countries. It then considers the songs’ relationship to history: what events are recorded/remembered in the songs, and how are they presented? The Introduction concludes by considering aspects of performance and the social contexts that have given these songs their cultural meaning and ensured their renewal and survival to the present day.

Conceptual foundations for the development of J.G.Turner’s general sociological theory: Metatheoretical ideas, basic concepts and analytical scheme

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-60
Author(s):  
Volodymyr Reznik
Keyword(s):  
Social Evolution ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Analytical Scheme ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
The Social ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
Basic Concepts ◽  
Conceptual Foundations

The article discusses the conceptual foundations of the development of the general sociological theory of J.G.Turner. These foundations are metatheoretical ideas, basic concepts and an analytical scheme. Turner began to develop a general sociological theory with a synthesis of metatheoretical ideas of social forces and social selection. He formulated a synthetic metatheoretical statement: social forces cause selection pressures on individuals and force them to change the patterns of their social organization and create new types of sociocultural formations to survive under these pressures. Turner systematized the basic concepts of his theorizing with the allocation of micro-, meso- and macro-levels of social reality. On this basis, he substantiated a simple conceptual scheme of social dynamics. According to this scheme, the forces of macrosocial dynamics of the population, production, distribution, regulation and reproduction cause social evolution. These forces force individual and corporate actors to structurally adapt their communities in altered circumstances. Such adaptation helps to overcome or avoid the disintegration consequences of these forces. The initial stage of Turner's general theorizing is a kind of audit, modification, modernization and systematization of the conceptual apparatus of sociology. The initial results obtained became the basis for the development of his conception of the dynamics of functional selection in the social world.

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